Saturday, 14 April 2012

"My name is Karl. And I am not a Marxist"

Mamata Banerjee is no stranger to controversy.
Conspiracy, it seems though, is what really bothers her. Well, personally I
have run out of jokes on her conspiracy theories regarding crib deaths,
censuring newspapers, and labelling rapes as orchestrated by her detractors.
And now she had to go and remove references of Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels
from the state higher secondary syllabus. And more recently—which is actually a
day old—she got a professor arrested for circulating a “malicious, and
derogatory” cartoon of her on the internet.

It was rather hilarious, until the Marx bit. But
now, I’ve hit saturation point. I mean, there is a limit to how many times you
can tweet about one person on Twitter. And like I said, I was
running of jokes.

From a probashi (diaspora) point-of-view, I’ve always imagined
how life in WB would’ve been like. I mean, apart from my annual trips to my
ancestral home, and the two-day stay at Calcutta, I have never really explored
the culture there, and nor have I had a chance to understand the politics of
the state—at least, in a way I understand it back home, considering the Saffron
legacy in Bombay and Maharashtra. Now, however, I am not too sure. I think
being a distant commentator (and thus, far away from Mamata’s jurisdiction) is
what I would prefer. Heck, I’m even trying to contemplate under what section
she could charge me (to the utter horror of my dad). The thing is, honestly,
I know that the politics of the Trinamool are fed by paranoia
and paranoia alone; their ideology, so to say, is an anti-ideology—violently
negating every (seemingly oppositional) belief system, be it political,
ethical, cultural or moral.

So, without taking on the Trinamool and Mamata
directly (mostly, because I don’t wish to recycle Arnab Goswami’s profound
critiques) I think I should give a little thought to the ‘real’ victims of the
Didi’s vendetta: Marx and Engels.

My first tryst was Marx was in the 10th standard, when I first
wished to read Das Kapital, as much as I wanted to read
Rousseau, or Jefferson—because back then, history had a way of inspiring the
mind of a fifteen year-old, and the idea that I could bask in the ideas of
these great men, ideas which inspired revolutions, was just fascinating.

Fast forward four years, when I’ve actually read
quite a bit of Marx, well enough to see the naivety and sheer stupidity of
Mamata’s move. And I don’t think Mamata’s solely responsible for this—the more
widespread outlook on Marx, and Marxism, are often very crass and diluted
versions of Marx’s original ideas. For example, almost everyone—every layperson
at least—would equate Soviet Communism with Marx. While Marx’s vision of the
Revolution did indeed encapsulate the establishment of a communist stage,[1] but he never envisaged a communist state—which
is a contradiction in terms.[2] The later works of
Marx are often his more scientific one; that is, his vision of the revolution
isn’t merely a utopian one, but a scientific and logical one, which is rooted
in the class inequalities and exploitation of the capitalist political-economy.[3]

The Communist Party of India’s (Marxist) attempts
have also been an ideological corruption of several of Marx’s core arguments;
the bourgeoisie social location of its top leaders, like Karat, Yechury and
their well-rehearsed arguments against the neo-liberal economics, are examples
of a few. However, the real issue here is not the CPI(M), but the problem of
putting a Marxian ideology (once again, a contradiction in
terms, insofar as Marx’s works are concerned)[4] in the multiparty political scene
in India.

I’ve had the privilege of learning under teachers
who’ve presented both the strengths and weaknesses of the bulk of Marx’s works,
and under them, I’ve had the confidence to engage with (and critique) some of
his ideas, which I wouldn’t have, had I not been interested in the philosopher
as a naïve 15 year-old. And by removing the reference to Marx (for, they’re
exactly that: references to Marx and Engels, in context of the
Russian and Industrial Revolution, where they all but mention Marx for a mere
paragraph or two) she’s sending out a very wrong, and erroneous message to the
to-be intellectual van guard of tomorrow: the fact that someone else gets to
choose and thus, to shape what we would learn; the ideology of the state, an
ideology of paranoia. I agree with Derek O’brien when he says equal weightage
has to be given to Mahatma and Mandela. But is Marx any more, or less,
important? I don’t think so. For, as a friend of mine put it, in education,
balancing is not synonymous with deletion.

In one sociology class, we were debating the
relevance of Marxian thought, one side of the argument stating that Marx’s
works have lost their relevance now that the revolution he predicted never
happened, and that even universities abroad don’t study Marx. Then again, on
the other hand, modification of Marxian thought, like the new-Leftism of the
Frankfurt School,[5] and very recent movements
against neo-liberal economics, like ‘Occupy Wall Street’ have showed that the
central arguments of Marx’s works will always be relevant,
because of their deep engagement with the struggles of humanity. And as long as
the debate rages, young people will find one way or another to read up on Marx,
and by god, we need educational institutions which can guide students without
corrupting the core ideas of an intellectual tradition.

Marx’s sociology was, in many ways, incomplete. But
which theory is otherwise? I think (arguably) his most central idea—that of
economic determinism, has been proved wrong by both his critics as well as his
successors.[6] But that only enhances his
relevance, not diminishes it. In a country like ours, until we’re able to
tackle the most basic, and human issues, the German philosopher would continue
to influence as well as intimidate, many like me and my peers. But I cannot see
a reason why Didi should be so bothered. I mean, by the extension of her logic,
the next step would be to ban left-lane driving in West Bengal. Then again, to
those of you familiar with WB traffic, there is hardly any
lane driving, in the first place.

Endnotes

[1] Marx essentially sees
history as dialectic, that is, it moves through stages with different competing
interests between social groups; the stages he refers to are: primitive
communism, where everyone owned everything; slave mode of production where the
slaves had no rights; the feudal mode, where the serfs were tied to their
lands; capitalistic mode, where the capitalist owned resources, including the
labour of the workers; and, the stage of communism, where the capitalistic
economy was dismantled, or overthrown.

[2] For the revolution to be
successful, Marx predicted, it was necessary that the state, which is an
apparatus to favour the capital-owning class, to “wither away”.

[3] In a capitalistic
political-economy, it was in the state’s benefit to favour the capital-owning
class as it ensured greater profits for the state. The population, for Marx,
was effectively divided into the bourgeoisie and the proletariat (haves and
have-nots, respectively) and the latter were exploited by the former. Class
struggle was thus, the basic premise of the revolution, for Marx.

[4] For Marx, ideologies or the
“superstructure” (e.g. religion, political systems etc.) stemmed from the
“base”, viz. the material or the economic sphere, i.e. the relationship of man
to the means of production.

[5] By the mid-twentieth
century, proponents of Marxian thought were disillusioned with the Soviet
state’s practice of ‘corrupted’ Communism, and the blatant capitalistic
economies of the West. Thus, a new wave in Marxian thought emerged, of which
one of the most well-known is the Frankfurt Institute (1930s to 1960s).

[6] The Frankfurt School, for
example, used the ideas of another sociologist, Max Weber, and argued against
the economic reductionism of traditional Marxian thought, saying that
ideologies and ideas were equally important as, and not entirely dependent on,
the economic sphere of life.